Antibody engineering to improve manufacturability

Publication date: September 2018 Source:Protein Expression and Purification, Volume 149 Author(s): Sujeewa D. Wijesuriya, Elizabeth Pongo, Milan Tomic, Fangjiu Zhang, Consuelo Garcia-Rodriquez, Fraser Conrad, Shauna Farr-Jones, James D. Marks, Arnold H. Horwitz Expression variation among antibodies produced by stably transfected Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells is well established. While developing CHO-K1 cell lines, we encountered a human monoclonal antibody, mAb B-c, with severe manufacturability issues, including very poor expression and high levels of heavy chain (HC) dimer and high molecular weight aggregates. Using transient expression in CHO-K1 cells, we identified light chain (LC) as the source of the manufacturability issues for this antibody. While other antibodies achieved optimal expression at 1:1 or 2:1 LC to HC ratios, mAb B-c required up to a 6:1 LC:HC for maximal expression, which was still significantly lower than that for other tested antibodies. To overcome the manufacturability issues, LC shuffling was performed with the original HC to select antibodies with unique LCs which retained acceptable binding affinities. Transient CHO-K1 expression evaluation of the new LCs co-expressed with the original HC identified antibodies with high expression at a 1:1 or 2:1 LC:HC; the expression levels of these new antibodies were comparable to those of other well-expressed antibodies. Expression of these new antibodies in stably transfected CHO-K1 cells confi...
Source: Protein Expression and Purification - Category: Biochemistry Source Type: research